Italy’s coastguard, which coordinates the rescue effort in international waters, reported that a total of 1,500 people had been saved on Thursday and Friday.

– Sharp drop in Italy arrivals –

The large numbers of recent days contrast with the sharp drop since mid-July in the number of migrants being brought to Italy.

On Thursday, the UNHCR put the number of arrivals at Italian ports in the previous three months at 21,666, the lowest total registered in four years for that period of the year.

The downward trend has been attributed to a controversial combination of an Italian-led boosting of the Libyan coastguard’s ability to intercept boats and efforts to enlist the help of powerful militias to curb traffickers’ activity.

There have also been moves to tighten Libya’s southern borders, accelerate repatriations directly from Libya and measures to stem the flow of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa through transit states such as Niger and Sudan.

Those rescued by Libyan coastguard on Saturday were brought back to a naval base in Tripoli where the authorities provided them with water, food and medical care.

Migrants intercepted or rescued by the Libyans are usually held in detention centres to await repatriation, but waiting times are often long and conditions deplorable.

UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein in mid-November labelled as “inhuman” European Union support for Libyan authorities to intercept migrants in the Mediterranean and return them to “horrific” prisons in Libya.

Last week, US television network CNN aired footage of an apparent slave auction in Libya where black men were presented to North African buyers as potential farmhands and sold off for as little as $400 (350 euros).

Libya’s UN-backed unity government said it would form a “commission to investigate these reports in order to apprehend and bring those responsible to justice”.

People trafficking networks have flourished in the chaos that followed a NATO-backed uprising which toppled long-time dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.

The unity government has said Libya is “a victim of illegal immigration, a transit state, not its source”, adding that the only solution is a return to stability.

Numbers of unclaimed corpses are rising in the mortuaries of public hospitals across the country as families abandon the bodies of loved ones, an investigation by Saturday PUNCH has revealed.

In some cases, it was learnt that families who had spent a lot of money taking care of sick relations, simply abandoned them when they died.

Some mortuary attendants told our correspondents that the relatives of many of such deceased persons no longer pick their calls. Also compounding the number of unclaimed corpses are those of mentally challenged victims who died on the street as well as accident victims and suspected armed robbers killed by security agents.

The situation is so dire in Cross River State that over 1,000 unclaimed corpses are currently in public and private mortuaries in the state, Saturday PUNCH learnt.

Authorities of the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital had in 2013 buried over 200 unclaimed corpses in a mass grave.

The Calabar General Hospital in 2015 also buried over 100 corpses for lack of space.

Apart from accident victims, the bulk of corpses were abandoned by dubious relatives who provided fake contact addresses after depositing the dead bodies, it was learnt.

A private mortician operating in Ikom Local Government Area of the state, Mr. Emeka Ben-Chima, decried the health risk constituted by the high number of corpses abandoned in mortuaries across the state.

Ben-Chima said that over 300 corpses had been left unclaimed in his mortuary and others for several years with some deposited as far back as 2010.

He said, “Some of the dead bodies are from Akwa Ibom and neighbouring states. Others are from Cameroon and Cross River State which were deposited by people who said they were their relatives but they failed to collect them after many years. We tried to trace the addresses they gave us but discovered that those addresses were fake and the phone numbers they gave too were fake.”

Unlike the cases of UCTH and the General Hospital in Calabar, Ben-Chima said he was afraid of burying the bodies in a mass grave because the owners of the corpses might appear some day to demand for the bodies of their relatives.

In Ekiti State for instance, the situation has become so bad that the state government announced over the radio one week ago that families who had unclaimed corpses in the government hospitals in the state should come for them immediately as the situation had become worse.

Raising the alarm over the situation in the mortuary of the Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital, Ado Ekiti, the Chief Medical Director, Dr. Kolawole Ogundipe, said that unclaimed corpses in the mortuary had become a threat to the smooth running of the facility.

Ogundipe said such unclaimed bodies had occupied the available space in the mortuary and was impeding service delivery.

In a similar case, a spokesperson for the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu, Mr. Cyril Keleze, said the situation in the facility’s mortuary had become so bad that morticians who maintain the bodies were now finding it difficult to manage because of the congestion.

“In this kind of situation, we’ll get the permission of the government to go ahead and bury such corpses in order to decongest the mortuary,” Keleze said. In Oyo State, a health worker at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the situation as a constant worry for the management of the hospital’s mortuary.

The source said it had become common for families who could not afford to pay mortuary and hospital bills to simply abandon the corpses of their deceased relations.

Another source in the hospital said UCH authorities had made announcements in the media this year, calling on families of the deceased persons to come for the corpses.

The source said, “The law says that operators of public mortuaries must place advertisements in a major newspaper two or three times before classifying bodies as abandoned corpses. After the first advertisement, you have to wait for certain number of days before placing a reminder, after which you can go ahead and dispose the bodies. Sometimes, a third reminder may be necessary depending on the number of the corpses involved.

“The management of UCH placed advertisements in the newspapers to announce that there were abandoned corpses in the hospital mortuary. There were few responses but many bodies still had to be disposed. There have been two batches of such disposal this year but I cannot verify the number of corpses involved. Without conducting such exercise, the mortuary would be crowded and unhygienic.”

The situation is the same in Osun State where the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology Teaching Hospital in Osogbo had to organise a mass burial for some unclaimed corpses last week.

In Kwara State, hospital authorities are finding it difficult to track down many of the relations of the deceased as the contact numbers of many of them have remained switched off.

The Director-General, Kwara State Hospitals Management Bureau, Dr. Olubunmi Jetawo-Winter, told one of our correspondents on Friday that two of the state government mortuaries were facing the problem of unclaimed corpses.

She said the hospital management bureau had made concerted efforts to contact affected families to claim the corpses, but have been largely unsuccessful.

According to her, the hospitals have been incurring the costs of preserving the corpses without knowing when the families would ever come for them.

To find a solution to this problem, Jetawo-Winter said the hospital management had notified the Ministry of Justice and the Kwara State Police Command to help track down the families. But in the meantime, she said the bureau would continue to make public announcements.

Our correspondent in Ondo State also reported that the mortuary in the specialist hospital in the state capital, Akure, was filled with abandoned corpses.

An attendant in the hospital, who pleaded anonymity, said some of the corpses were identified but that the families had simply refused to claim them.

“But we cannot dispose them unless the government approves their disposal. When it is time for the disposal, the government would announce its intention in the media and a deadline would be set,” the attendant said.

However, findings showed that that this situation does not affect hospitals in the northern part of the country where Muslims are required to inter the bodies of deceased persons within a day of their death.

Copyright PUNCH. All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from PUNCH.

Tears flowed freely on Thursday as the decomposing remains of civilian victims of the attack on five villages in Niger State were removed from the Minna General Hospital mortuary for burial.

No fewer than five corpses of victims belonging to the Islamic faith were loaded into pick-up vans enroute the cemetery while the remains of two Christian casualties were handed over to the local chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria for interment.

This is as the state government set up a judicial commission of inquiry into last week’s attack on Kpaidna and four other villages in the Bosso Local Government Area of the state.

No fewer than 19 people including 12 soldiers died in the attack which followed the search for arms and ammunition reportedly hidden in the village.

The decision of the government to set up the commission of inquiry also came on the heels of the burial of civilian casualties of the disturbance.

The state’s Commissioner for Justice, Mr. Nasara Dan-Malam, who disclosed the government’s plan on Thursday at a news conference in Minna, neither gave the names of the members of the committee nor its chairman.

Dan-Malam, however, said the terms of reference of the commission would include “but not limited to investigating the remote and immediate causes of the disturbance and make appropriate recommendations to government.

“The commission will be empowered with all the necessary instruments by the state governor.”

Copyright PUNCH. All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from PUNCH.